Three Things You Never Thought You'd See Together
Rep. Reuven Carlyle on the ongoing budget issues during the Legislative Special Session:
I have been unrelentingly critical of the 2015 Senate budget that is predicated on an extraordinary level of marijuana revenues. Unfortunately, thanks in part to a quirk of timing, the non partisan Economic & Revenue Forecast Council is projecting marijuana tax collections that are astronomical and, in my view, based on faulty assumptions. This, in effect, implies that the state Senate’s heavy reliance on marijuana taxes is reasonable.
Regardless of the past, marijuana revenues are too new, too uncertain and too unpredictable to be a responsible basis of an education budget.
I find it ironic that on the issue of marijuana taxation it is Democrats–who generally supported I-502– who are more cautious and fiscally conservative and Republicans–who generally opposed I-502– who are acting more like big spending addicts
Carlyle has some compelling reasoning on some in the Senate are too quick to jump on a bong's revenues.
I have been unrelentingly critical of the 2015 Senate budget that is predicated on an extraordinary level of marijuana revenues. Unfortunately, thanks in part to a quirk of timing, the non partisan Economic & Revenue Forecast Council is projecting marijuana tax collections that are astronomical and, in my view, based on faulty assumptions. This, in effect, implies that the state Senate’s heavy reliance on marijuana taxes is reasonable.
Regardless of the past, marijuana revenues are too new, too uncertain and too unpredictable to be a responsible basis of an education budget.
I find it ironic that on the issue of marijuana taxation it is Democrats–who generally supported I-502– who are more cautious and fiscally conservative and Republicans–who generally opposed I-502– who are acting more like big spending addicts
Carlyle has some compelling reasoning on some in the Senate are too quick to jump on a bong's revenues.
Comments
The thing that amazes me (but it shouldn't, I suppose) is that the people of the state of Washington voted, through the initiative, for specific uses for those funds -- and they did that very recently -- at a time when it was CLEAR that we had huge educational funding problems. If voters had wanted tax revenues from legalized marijuana to go to education, they presumably would have said so. The Rs LOVE tax initiatives when it is the people telling the state not to raise taxes. Why is it suddenly so ok to ignore the express will of the voters with respect to a stream of revenue that voters said was to go to specific purposes?
Jan
Since the politicians wish to raise revenue from pot taxes, illegal pot business will flourish as untaxed illegal pot will undersell legal pot.
Viva cartels. --- So sad.
-- Dan Dempsey
The sad thing is that the revenue was intended to be used to study pot on many levels as well as addiction programs but the R's have no problem going against the will of the people. :-(